


A Space in the World

by Anna__S



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 16:57:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2819483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna__S/pseuds/Anna__S
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was just another thing that she knew but didn’t understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Space in the World

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the weeks and months following The Spacewalker. Presumes knowledge of all aired episodes.

 

 

They give them his body back.

“We do not disrespect the dead,” Lincoln tells them. He’s leaning heavily against Octavia, his left leg still too weak to support his full weight.

Finn’s arm has fallen out of the loose fabric they’ve bound him with. Clarke bends down, yanking at the edge of the wrap, and for one wild moment, she worries that he can’t breathe. His skin is swollen and soft to the touch, like a rotten peach.

Then her mother is there, pulling her back. 

“You don’t need to see him like this,” her mother says. As if she’s never been buried under a jumble of dead bodies. As if his blood is not still crusted under her fingernails.

That night, she dreams of him for the first time. His body is stretched out on a cot in the medical bay, and she traces the edge of the bruises along his sternum, feeling the punctures in his skin, the broken bones so close, just under the surface. 

She counts the tears across his legs, the gashes along his shoulders and last of all, the knife wound in his chest, clean and deep. His face is the same as the first time she saw him, untouched by violence.    

After that, her dreams always end there, in that room. And even when she doesn’t remember, she wakes up in a cold sweat, the bitter sting of adrenaline burning her throat, her fingers reaching out, curving into the empty air, and she knows, she knows.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She tells Raven the idea first. It seems important somehow, like her version of an apology or a condolence prize. And Raven will know better than anybody whether it’s feasible. 

For nearly a full minute, Raven doesn’t acknowledge her presence in the tent, but her eyes slide to the map in Clarke’s hand. The detailed diagram is littered with notations and arrows.

“I have an idea for how to take out Mount Weather. Can you tell me if it’s do-able?” she asks.

Raven silently pulls the sheet from her hands, her eyebrows pulling together.

“It might be possible,” she says, after a long pause. “But it’s not going to bring down the mountain. What you’re taking about is the equivalent of a crack in their armor.”

“But can’t you see, that’s all we need.  They won’t be able to survive the radiation in the air long enough to fix it.”

“But they’ll all die, Clarke.  All of them. And there are kids in there.” 

“I know, but it can’t be helped. You didn't see them, you don't understand. They’re vampires.  As long as they’re alive, they’re a threat to all of us. And it won’t hurt our people. It’s the perfect solution.”

 _“Them_ you save,” says Raven bitterly. Time has worn her anger down to something more toxic and more manageable. Something that can’t be burned through or waited out.

“Raven, you need –“ she begins, but Raven shakes her head. Her eyes flutter closed. “I’m not saying I don’t understand why you did it.  I’m saying you don’t understand me. You had parents, you had friends. All I had was Finn. And you took that from me. Twice." 

When she opens her eyes again, they’re dark with pain. “Leave the diagram behind. I’ll let you know when I’ve figured it out.”

All of Clark's instincts tell her to try again, that maybe this time she can get Raven to _see_. It's not in her nature to back down. But her instincts have been wrong before. She was wrong about Bellamy and she was wrong about Finn. She might've even been wrong about herself. 

 

 

* * *

 

  

The fog is on their heels. It swirls through the snow, making eerie green shapes in the dusk. She can feel the acrid stench of it on her tongue.

Her fingers are clumsy and thick with cold, and she knows Bellamy is one second from yanking the tent out of her hands when it pops open and she slips inside with him treading on her heels.  He zips it shut behind them.

“God, that was close,” he says.

They kneel down at the same time, crouched next to each other in the tight space.

“Well, next time maybe you should remember your pack,” she mutters, although she knows that once her pulse slows down and her heart stops crashing into her throat, she’ll be glad for the extra body heat. 

The tent is waterproof, but the cold is already seeping through the thin fabric. Her hands are shaking and she can’t help but stare at them. She knows that shivering is just the body’s way of generating its own warmth, but that makes it no less strange. It’s another thing she knew but didn’t understand.

“You still have the transmitt- whatever that thing is?” he asks.

She taps the pouch tied around her waist.

“Do we even really know what it does?”

She shrugs. “Raven does and that’s enough for me.” Even saying Raven’s name makes her flinch, instinctively, like maybe a blow is headed her way. Bellamy glances at her, something unreadable flitting across his face.

They are close enough that the small puffs of his breath are cold on her cheek and she can see the crystals of ice stuck in his eyelashes.  She resists the urge to wipe them away. 

“Have you ever seen it snow like this?” he asks. 

“Yes, Bellamy. Sometimes it snowed on my section of the Arc.” 

She can’t tell if the red flush creeping along his neck is embarrassment or frostbite, but she decides he’s not the only one allowed to say idiotic things. 

“This is going to sound dumb, but I never realized cold was this…cold.”

He smiles, moving his hands in front of him and rubbing them together, like they’re sitting in front of an imaginary fire.

The gusts of snow roll off the tent’s curved top, but she can feel the weight of it growing heavy against the sides. It gives her a false sense of safety; of walls and a ceiling, like being home again. When she closes her eyes, she can almost feel the pulse of the spaceship thudding through her. On the Arc, she daydreamed of open skies and now she dreams of boxes, of a place somewhere with room enough for all the people she’s sworn to keep safe. 

“Octavia would hate this,” he says. When she looks over at him, she realizes his eyes are closed too.

“Why?" 

“You know she hates standing still.”

He says it lightly, but she knows he doesn’t mean it that way. She remembers when they brought Octavia in, how she screamed for days. She used to wonder what torture they were inflicting upon her, but it occurs to her now, that maybe she was screaming because for the first time, she could.

 “It’s not my favorite thing either,” she says. “I think the fog is gone. We should get going.”

“Whoa, whoa, slow down. Do you see how hard it’s snowing? We won’t be able to see more than a foot in this stuff.”

“Raven’s relying on us.”

“Okay,” he says. “Why don’t you poke your head out and tell me what direction you’d like to walk in.”  

She starts to unzip the tent and is immediately smacked with a mouthful of wet snow. There’s nothing to see but white in every direction.

He keeps his mouth set in a tight line, but she can see the smile in his eyes and it is no less annoying. 

She sits back down next to him, trying to wipe the snow from her shoulders. The pulsing pain in her fingers has long since surrendered to numbness.

“I see your point.”

“Raven said we had until tomorrow afternoon to get it in place. We’ll make it.” 

She almost pulls away when he takes her hands in his, moving them back and forth between his rough palms. Shocks of pain follow his touch until it feels like her hands are on fire. 

Her muscles are tense and exhausted, strung out like a band pulled too far, too often. And she is so, so tired of being afraid. Her head slumps to the side, her forehead knocking lightly against his arm. The warmth of his shoulder against her skin reminds her of her father, and a familiar wave of loss rushes over her. 

She never wondered why her parents chose each other or why they stayed together when so many other families on the Arc were transient.  Her mother knew veins and arteries, how to coax life back into injured bodies; his father could spot the dissonant tone of a broken thruster from a section away. She’d loved to watch him work, humming fragments of half-remembered songs, the same songs he used to lull her to sleep.

“You should’ve been a singer,” she would tell him.

“In another life, kid,” he would say. Because both her parents always knew what they were put on the Arc to do: they were there to fix things. There were days, now, when she was glad that her father never made it down here. Never saw what they became. 

“When I was little, I was obsessed with this idea that someday we would figure out time travel." The sound of her voice surprises her.  

“Okay,” he says, a small crinkle forming between his eyes.

“I had this idea that if we could just go back in time, if we could just tell people what the bombs would do, none of it would’ve happened. There never would’ve been a war or an Arc or Grounders. We would have belonged here from the beginning.”

Something about the steady snow and the darkness of the tent is soothing. She feels hypnotized by the rhythm of her own words, compelled to continue to fill the space between them.

“But that’s not right, is it.”

“What do you mean?” he asks. 

“If somebody told you, right now, that they had a weapon that would bring down Mount Weather and save our people, would you use it?”

“Of course.”

“But what if they also told you that there would be consequences and that someday, people would use that weapon to do terrible things.”

He stares at her. His mouth opens and closes.  

“Me too,” she admits. The world was always going to end in fire. She can’t save herself from making the same mistakes. The best they can hope to do is carve out a space in the world for themselves, and make sure that when the rest of the world burns, it reaches them last.

“But we could do things differently. We could keep the weapons out of the wrong people’s hands, or destroy them once we’re done.”

“I bet they thought the same thing.” 

Their eyes meet and she is suddenly aware of how chapped his skin is. She pulls her hands away.

“What happened wasn’t your fault, Clarke,” he says after a long pause.  

She tilts her chin up. 

“It should’ve been me,” she says. 

“No, it shouldn’t have been.”  It’s hard to remember that there was a time when she hated that he dealt in absolutes. She’s not sure if that means she’s changed or if it just means that she’s one of his absolutes now.

“Why?” she asks, waiting for him to say that she’s different, that she’s only killed when she had to. That she is less culpable. 

“Because we need you.”

She lets out a small huff. 

There are things she wants to tell him, because if anybody could understand, it would be him. She wants to describe how easy it was to push the knife in, how it just slipped right in because she knows exactly where the ribs are, because she was meant to be a doctor. And how in that moment, she knew that there was no other Clarke waiting on the other side of this. There was only her.

“We do what we need to do, that’s who we are,” he says and she thinks maybe he already knows.  Against her will, a yawn slips out. 

“You can sleep,” he says, nudging her shoulder. “I’ll keep watch.” He taps the gun at their feet affectionately. 

She doesn’t actually remember falling asleep; she felt like she just fell deeper into the black stillness of the tent. But when she wakes up her arm is still swinging away from her, and she’s sprawled across the floor. There’s a red mark the size and shape of her fist on Bellamy’s chin, just under the gash that he won't let her clean.  

“Sorry,” she says, blushing. “I should’ve warned you that I’m kind of a restless sleeper.”

“You think?” he asks, rubbing his jaw gingerly, but he’s grinning. “You look so angry when you’re sleeping. You make the same face you make when I’m annoying you.” 

Clarke pulls herself to her feet. The gun is slung across his shoulder, cradled in his arms and something about it allows her to focus, pushes away the last uneasy tendrils of sleep.  

“I was about to wake you up anyway, the snow’s quieted down. I think we should get going.”

The low-level anxiety that's always buzzing through her suddenly kicks into high gear, and the need to be moving is almost overwhelming.  When she opens the tent, she blinks. The snow is blinding, reflecting the light back at them, like having a flashlight shined directly into her eyes.

She steps out after him and immediately slips.  She expects the snow to be harder than it is, but her leg plunges waist-deep into the soft powder.  The shock of it sends her tumbling down face-first into a snowdrift.

Ahead of her, Bellamy’s arms are moving in wide, jerky circles as he tries to maintain his balance.  When he finally topples to the ground, it’s like watching a large tree fall very, very slowly.

She starts to grin and he chuckles, and then both of them are laughing and she tries to say his name, but she trips over her own hiccupping laughs. The woods are very quiet and very still and so beautiful and for a moment, she can believe that maybe they are the only people left in the world, two kids, sharing their first snow.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a prompt that asked for Bellamy/Clarke, snowed in. I suspect this is not what they were looking for though, oops.


End file.
